Newspaper Faults Columnist for Remarks on Jews

By RANDALL ROTHENBERG

Published: September 20, 1990

An angry debate between opinion-page columnists took an unusual turn yesterday when The New York Post attacked Patrick J. Buchanan in an editorial next to his column. The Post said that ''when it comes to Jews as a group,'' Mr. Buchanan ''betrays an all-too-familiar hostility.''

In the column, headed ''Dividing Line,'' Mr. Buchanan responded to a charge of anti-Semitism leveled against him on the Op-Ed page of The New York Times last Friday in a column by A. M. Rosenthal.

Both the Post editorial and Mr. Rosenthal condemned Mr. Buchanan as unfairly singling out Jews from among the proponents of an American military response to Iraq's invasion of Kuwait. Specifically, they objected to a comment Mr. Buchanan made on Aug. 24 on the television program ''The McLaughlin Group,'' a round-table discussion of Washington opinion. He said on the program, ''There are only two groups that are beating the drums for war in the Middle East: the Israeli defense ministry and its amen corner in the United States.'' He made a similar remark in an Aug. 27 column.

The Post and Mr. Rosenthal also criticized the conservative columnist for doubting the authenticity of some elements of the Holocaust.

In his syndicated column published yesterday and in a telephone interview, Mr. Buchanan, who was a communications aide in the Nixon and Reagan Administrations, angrily denied that he was hostile to American Jews and called the charge of anti-Semitism an effort to stifle debate about America's relationship with Israel.

'A Really Terrible Charge'

''This is a really terrible charge that is almost impossible to answer,'' Mr. Buchanan said. ''Do I have sharp disagreements with some members of the Jewish community with regard to Israel? Yes, profound disagreements. But is there embedded hatred? No. Of course not.''

In yesterday's editorial, The Post said it was concerned about ''Buchanan's attitude toward Jews as a group.'' It noted that when Mr. Buchanan, who opposes American military intervention in the Persian Gulf, has complained about those who favor it, he has ignored non-Jews like Senator Alfonse M. D'Amato of New York and John O'Sullivan, the editor of The National Review magazine, and mentioned only prominent Jews, including Mr. Rosenthal of The Times and former Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger.

The Post editorial also criticized a Buchanan column last March in which he questioned whether diesel engines, which an Israeli court said were used to kill prisoners in the Treblinka death camp, emitted enough carbon monoxide to kill people. Such information, The Post said, is distributed by ''crackpots - flat-earth types - who happen, also, to despise Jews.''

The Post's editorial page editor, Eric Breindel, said he published the editorial in part because he wanted to dissociate the paper from Mr. Buchanan's views. Mr. Buchanan's column is syndicated by Tribune Media Services.

Mr. Buchanan has characterized the political split over intervention in the Persian Gulf as a division between traditional conservatives like himself, who believe the United States should be cautious in its global commitments, and neo-conservatives, who want the nation to be more active.

''If you're in an argument with the neocons, their brightest lights are Jewish writers and pundits and officials,'' Mr. Buchanan said yesterday. ''So who else can you take on?''

He said his questioning of specific aspects of the Holocaust was part of his defense of John Demjanjuk, a Cleveland automobile worker whom an Israeli court convicted of murdering prisoners at Treblinka.

In his column yesterday, William F. Buckley Jr., the writer and founder of The National Review, said Mr. Buchanan was insensitive and Mr. Rosenthal was overly sensitive to words that could be construed as anti-Semitic.